“... tried to anaesthetise politics, to turn the state into a work of art in order to legitimise their power’ – and adds that this ‘process’ was ‘already in evidence’ in the Court masques of the Renaissance. The masque-loving king of Sidney’s Arcadia is thought guilty by Norbrook of ‘irresponsible absolutism’, but it is absenteeism, not ...”

“... Thatcher and Helmut Kohl). He also conducted interviews with Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, and Anne Pingeot, his long-time mistress. The result is a rich, detailed and dependable biography, framed as a ‘study in ambiguity’. Who was Mitterrand? Was he really a man of the left? Did he have any strong beliefs at all? Was he really the most successful ...”

“... Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote share. But its Conservative MP, Anne Main, is strongly pro-Brexit, and I was curious to see which way people are likely to jump come the next, surely imminent election.By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian strongholds. After Bath, Edinburgh and St Albans ...”

“... civic worthy and falling into debt. In 1582, at the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. By 1592 he was in London, and by the mid-to-late 1590s had become a ‘sharer’ (profit-sharing partner) in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. As a result of the commercial success of the company he was able in 1597 to buy New Place, one of the ...”

“... a grandchild). Her husband Asa uses the anger he feels against his parents (Yehuda and Naomi) to power a brilliant academic career and to elaborate a highly serviceable image of himself as an intellectual subversive and emotional martyr. Tsvi, his older brother, has opted for a view of himself as degenerate and immoral, at once burlesquing the father he ...”

“... He designed Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral and the subtle profile of the erstwhile Bankside Power Station – now disfigured as Tate Modern, lest anyone doubt that it purveys art in place of electricity. After Lutyens, Sir Giles was perhaps England’s best architect during the first half of the last century. These are the two celebrities from a ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... a gas station on the outskirts of St Louis. This sounds like snobbery. Lindbergh’s marriage to Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow – banker, ambassador and millionaire – took him into a more elevated society than that of Little Falls; Lincoln Kirstein, the balletomane, and his sister were part of it. Harold Nicolson also made a social judgment ...”

“... accustomed to her beauty, therefore never really interested in anything and with little or no power of admiration.’ Mrs Asquith’s arrogance is often staggering. She treats being the prime minister’s wife as a sort of high constitutional office. When the Zeppelins raid London, she sends for the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to give her a ...”

“... sacred breast’. It is a religious object, exhibited with veneration in relation to the Divine Power, as in Egyptian images of Isis suckling Horus, or nursing a pharaoh with the divine milk of life. Like most scholars who do not go into Egyptology, Yalom does not bother with deities other than Isis, or reflect on the worship of Hathor – often represented ...”

“... and rank. (As an aristocrat, Montagu thought the Christian religion too disrespectful of rank and power.) Docile also swallows all the stuff about the duty of a woman to maintain chastity no matter what should befall her, and she knows a woman should be faithful in the face of all temptations and injuries. Docile begins with the thoughtfulness about virtue ...”

“... and Qatar; and most Egyptians were willing to give him a chance. He entered office vowing to share power, only to hoard it. He antagonised Copts, said nothing when a mob carried out an anti-Shia pogrom, and stoked sectarian animosities by aligning himself with jihadists in Syria. For all his promises to relieve the suffering in Gaza, he seemed more interested ...”

“... Anne and I step aside from the slow-motion procession of tourists walking among the market stalls of Florence in the roasting sunshine and enter the Baptistery, a compact octagonal church with oblong-patterned, black-and-white façades like an enormous liquorice allsort. Our heads tilt upwards and we stare at the swarming life of the eight mosaic panels in the cupola, a hundred feet above us ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An ...”

“... the favourite occupation of his leisure hours had long been associated with the demonstration of power and prestige; Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (first English translation, 1561) was only the first of many treatises on aristocratic conduct to recommend drawing as an activity appropriate to men of the highest rank. Moreover, in a nation where ...”